Second Century Initiative researcher John Horgan, a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and director of the Next Generation Program-supported Violent Extremism Research Group, is researching the evolution and spread of a growing male supremacist movement online.
In the wake of the attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Second Century Initiative Professor Tony Lemieux spoke with Time about the difficulty that social media companies have in taking down extremist and violent content.
Time reported that the attacker initially live-streamed the footage of the assault online, and Facebook, YouTube and other companies struggled to block and delete the content. But copies of the content continued to spread to other sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and back to Facebook itself.
“It becomes essentially like a game of whack-a-mole,” Lemieux said.
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Research by a Presidential Fellow with the Transcultural Conflict and Violent Extremism (TCVE) Initiative, which is supported by the Next Generation Program, and colleagues has found that terror attacks carried out by Muslims receive on average 357 percent more media coverage than those committed by other groups.
The study, published in Justice Quarterly, found perpetrator religion is a major predictor of news coverage of a terrorist attack. Other factors also drive coverage, but to a lesser extent. The study authors note that in the United States, “members of the public tend to fear the ‘Muslim terrorist’ while ignoring other threats.”
“What was especially surprising was the sheer amount of coverage granted to the small handful of domestic terrorists who were both Muslim and from outside of the U.S.,” said Allison Betus, a Presidential Fellow with TCVE. “This tiny minority of the dataset accounted for a very large amount of coverage.”
The study was led by Dr. Erin Kearns, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and former post-doctoral research fellow at Georgia State, and Betus, working with Anthony Lemieux, professor at Georgia State and director of the university’s Global Studies Institute. Lemieux is also a faculty member who arrived under the Second Century Initiative (2CI), the predecessor of the Next Generation Program.
